Hard-to-eradicate, often untreatable, infections including chronic wounds and infections of medical devices pose increasing threats to human health worldwide. Such infections are often refractory to antibiotics due to antibiotic resistant bacterial cells, and/or to antibiotic tolerance of a subpopulation of bacterial cells that are not antibiotic resistant mutants but rather “dormant” cells that survive antibiotic killing. Antibiotic tolerance is defined as the ability of a fraction of a susceptible bacterial population to survive exposure to normally lethal concentrations of bactericidal antibiotics. According to the existing paradigm, many chronic infections are therefore untreatable.
The ligand activated transcriptional regulator, MvfR, plays a central role in controlling the pathology of acute bacterial infections, and the shift of Gram-negative bacteria from acute to chronic infection. MvfR inhibitors reduce virulence of Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a Gram-negative bacterial species, and reduce the formation of antibiotic resistant Pseudomonas strains in vitro.